Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, said on a podcast with tech podcaster Ashlee Vance that the recruitment war has shifted. According to Chen, Meta has aggressively pursued half of his direct reports—backed by a $10 billion war chest for talent—but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added a personal touch to the poaching attempts.
Zuckerberg, Chen said, has personally “hand-cooked” and “hand-delivered” soup to researchers he wanted to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn’t a joke, the executive insisted.
“It was shocking to me at the time,” Chen admitted. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you must respond in kind. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his own recruits as he hopes to poach talent from Meta. However, he draws the line at manual labor.
“These things can be effective in their own way,” he said. Chen is even planning a cooking class off-site to lean into the absurdity.
To poach the unpoachable, CEOs are forced to substitute capital or resources with intimacy. A CEO who turns up at your door with dinner is sending a message: You matter enough that I’ll spend my own time courting you.
Chen, for his part, is using the story to make a broader point about how the talent war actually feels from inside OpenAI. Media coverage has often framed Meta as simply vacuuming up OpenAI’s best people, Chen said.
He pushed back, saying Meta “went after a lot of people quite unsuccessfully,” and noted that half of his direct reports all turned the company down.
OpenAI’s retention strategy, he suggested, is less about matching Meta dollar-for-dollar and more about conviction: Researchers stay because they believe in the lab’s direction and its odds of being first to artificial general intelligence.
“Even among people who have offers from Meta,” Chen said, “I haven’t heard anyone say AGI is going to be developed at Meta first.”
